In this image released by the UN, bus loads of people leave the capital after an earthquake measuring 7 plus on the Richter scale rocked Port au Prince Haiti on January 12. (AFP/Getty Images)
Haitians by the thousands jammed into rickety wooden buses and open trucks to escape the capital on today, days after a killer earthquake leveled much of the city and turned it into an epicenter of despair.
Armed with little more than hope and the clothes on their backs, they headed for the countryside, hoping to leave behind the persistent tremors and the corpse-littered wreckage of the capital.
In the scramble to flee, Lucien St. Cyr and his little boy Jean Edy lucked out. Both jammed into a red open pickup with about 40 others who screamed and shoved in a battle over the available space. The passengers were hoping to make it to Jacmel, on the southern coast of Haiti some 50 miles away. The road was ruined, they were told, so the bus would take them about halfway. They then would have to walk over a broken section of road to catch another bus.
St. Cyr hoped to find shelter with a friend there. “We don’t know what to expect there, but we have nothing here. We have to leave,” he said. Their house fell in the quake, destroying all their possessions.
Roberthe Pierre and his huge tribe of relatives, meanwhile, were left in the rank dust. Pierre sadly watched that group depart. Tall and thin, he stood among 11 relatives, while another 12 sat on the ground nearby. Hundreds of others milled around the intersection, one of many in the capital where buses and pickups were being boarded.
Anyone here who could seemed eager to escape the capital city – which seemed to have borne the brunt of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck on Tuesday, killing tens of thousands.
Short on everything from medical supplies to water, the city resembled a giant morgue. Many of the bodies seemed to have been collected from the main streets on Saturday, but smell of death remained thick on lots of side streets, and many rotting corpses remain pinned under wreckage and could not be retrieved.
At the bus station, hundreds of people crowded any type of vehicle that backed in. Open-air mini buses and open-bed trucks were swarmed upon arrival with passengers literally stacked on top each other, some toting bags and in one case a chicken.
People who jumped into one red truck first hoisted others by their arms while friends on the ground shoved them from the other end. Some shouted angrily at a woman whose bag was taking up space they thought could be used for an additional passenger. She placed it on her lap and someone else immediately hopped aboard.
At the bus station, drivers had jacked up the price of tickets. People such as William Toussaint, a 24-year-old agronomy student, let others with more money go ahead. He had to take three buses to get to Jacmal to check on his brother and sister and needed to preserve cash.
Toussaint was picking up the pieces of his own crumbled home on Friday morning when a friend arrived with news that Toussaint’s brother and sister were buried under their school in Jacmal, but were still alive. He dropped what he was doing and rushed to the bus station, where he still was 24 hours later.
“They were alive yesterday,” he said of his siblings. But what he would find upon arrival was unclear.
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